Keith Robson’s research while affiliated with HEC Paris and other places

SYNOPSIS While accounting firms are facing recruitment and retention problems, regulatory bodies are calling for efforts to improve diversity to be more effective, especially at senior levels. In this paper, we discuss “merit” and assumptions about “meritocracy” in processes of performance evaluation and career progression. Based on interviews in medium and large professional services firms in the United Kingdom, we explore how the language/practices of merit can inhibit moves to improving diversity. Merit has two aspects: “technical” notions of core competencies associated with merit and cultural notions of social fit, which have the effect of favoring the progression of the elite groups embedded within firms. The latter creates a loop in understanding merit, enacted within firm culture over time, that is difficult to disrupt. As such, efforts to improve diversity are unlikely to bring about change without considering how organizational beliefs about merit have unintended consequences.

Research interest in the institutionalization of accounting has risen appreciably in the past twenty years. Much of this work has been occupied with regulations and professional norms, often in individual firm settings. However, social spaces around, i.e., institutional fields, and beyond corporations, regulatory agencies and professional organizations are important in the process of accounting innovation and transformation. This paper draws attention to these social spaces by developing the concept of the cultural fields of accounting practices as an institutional field level analysis that has so far been relatively neglected in the accounting literature. In developing this concept, we outline how we define and characterise cultural fields, emphasizing their cultural-cognitive character, their lack of formal governance, their dispersion and the varying social space they can inhabit (from bounded technology fields to global ‘world culture’ Meyer, 2009; Lechner & Boli, 2005). Our term ‘cultural fields’ references both the wider, field-level processes that are not captured by a focus upon professional norms and state regulations, and the ‘cultural-cognitive’ character of cultural field-level processes that we argue merit wider consideration in accounting research. We identify three linked features of the cultural fields of accounting practices: the dispersed sites of the cultural production of accounting; the diverse, shifting and hybridised logics; and the role of arbiters of tastes and the carriers of ‘best practices’. We draw on these key features to discuss and offer examples of researching accounting that would address these processes of accounting development and institutionalization.

This paper is located within the research problematic of multiple logics with reference to professional service firms (PSFs), and in particular audit firms. Within this multi-logic (“hybrid”) and complex organization, we are specifically concerned with the impacts of new institutional logics that reflect social and political movements - in this case diversity legislation - and how these new logics are absorbed and managed within the organizations’ structures and practices. Based upon a study of large and medium sized audit firms in the UK, we consider the organizational responses to the demands for improved diversity among firm members, especially the senior elite, in the context of the passing of the Equality Act, 2010, and subsequent legislation which both consolidated and extended UK laws on discrimination. Our study indicates how such organizational sites have value for demonstrating how the conflict between logics shifts its terms of reference. While most of the conflict between logics of commercialism and professionalism has been successfully managed through mechanisms of hybridization, we bring to the fore how the struggles between ideas about merit and diversity in professional evaluation processes and practices are more intractable. Our work contributes to an understanding of both the dependencies (blending) and co-existences (separation) that can exist between diversity, commercial and professional logics of practice in multi-logic organizations. We further highlight the role of identity scripts that shape how individuals situationally demarcate their identities as they struggle with the demands for diversity that challenge dominant logics.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an interdisciplinary discussion on the concepts of profit and profitability and various ways in which we could potentially problematize these concepts. It is our hope that a much greater attention or reconsideration of the problematization of profit and related accounting numbers will be fostered in part by the exchanges we include here. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts an interdisciplinary discussion approach and brings into conversation ideas and views of several scholars on problematizing profit and profitability in various contexts and explores potential implications of such problematization. Findings Profit and profitability measures make invisible the collective endeavour of people who work hard (backstage) to achieve a desired profit level for a division and/or an organization. Profit tends to preclude the social process of debate around contradictions among the ends and means of collective activity. An inherent message that we can discern from our contributors is the typical failure of managers to appreciate the value of critical theory and interpretive research for them. Practitioners and positivist researchers seem to be so influenced by neo-liberal economic ideas that organizations are distrusted and at times reviled in their attachment to profit. Research limitations/implications Problematizing opens-up the potential for interesting and significant theoretical insights. A much greater pragmatic and theoretical reconsideration of profit and profitability will be fostered by the exchanges we include here. Originality/value In setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism in the research community focussing on problematizing profit and profitability in various settings. The discussion perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this critical area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability but also emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and their undesired consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these accounting numbers.